Billy Momo on Spotify

Music and the need to alienate our parents

Billy Momo enjoys a whole lot of support from our parents. They turn up at gigs, buy too many T-shirts and share everything we do on social media. This is a bad thing.

It’s not bad parenting at all. On the contrary, it says a lot about our parents ability to adjust and support us no matter what we do. They’re just the way fans should be. Interactive and interested.

It does however say something less flattering about us as a band.

In my opinion, a signinicant part of all music innovation comes from the young man and womans urge to piss their parents off. Some of the greatest innovaters of our time are proof. What might Jimi Hendrix’ care takers have had to say when he started making his guitar sound like a monster? What was the one most important characteristic of early Beatles? Why do rappers say “fuck”, support violence and drugs? How many people know Pussy Riot by who they pissed off and how many people could actually hum one of their songs? Listen to any significant music genre at an early stage and tell me these kids’ parents were fine with this!

So, just as it’s an important part of growing up, revolting against your parents is a crucial part of innovating sounds. It goes hand in hand, really. You can’t stay out till too late, forget to take out the trash and refuse to put your feet down from the coffee table all the time. You need a weapon. And the weapon needs you. If it weren’t for teenage revolts, music might still sound like Blind Willie Nelson. Which is great music of course, but we like to have the options, right?

So, what to do? We are clearly not pissing our parents off as we should. In fact, I’m not sure we’re pissing anybody off. The reason probably being that we are now parents ourselves, most of us. Somehow, in the moment we first held our little ones, the switch was pulled. We are now designed to be pissed of and confused about the strange and very annoying things our kids are doing. Hopefully, though – and I’m pretty convinced that’s the case – we did piss them off when we were younger and by doing that, planted a seed to innovation which we do now reap. (Orren: lead vocal, acoustic guitar, banjo)

Ha ha! Actually, today when I was teaching one of my electric bass students, we practiced how to smash your instrument at the end of the show. He didn’t seem too impressed by the idea, though. I guess our old rebel moves are yesterdays news now..